Selected for the 2007 National Poetry Series by Naomi Shihab Nye
The prose poems in Installations invite the reader to encounter, in one extraordinary afternoon, a series of twenty art installations where something fantastic, perhaps improbable, occurs at the intersection of installed and imagined, spectator and event. Installations unites personal experience, suspense, and narrative—in those moments when we are forever altered by the mysterious and the enchanted.
A large, well-lit, white-walled room. You walk to a red line painted on the floor.
An eight-by-eight-foot wooden box, twelve inches deep, sits in the center of the room.
Gazing upward, you notice an enormous cutout hole, nearly the size of the ceiling itself. Clouds drift, far, fary away. A bright black bird darts by.
Fortunately the weather is nice. Since this installation opened, the weather has been dry and mild.
The box is filled with eight inches of rich, dark soil. You reach your hand toward the soil. Your hand comes back wet. The soil looks fecund, nearly obscenely so.
You peer into the box and notice three human-size lumps. These are human beings, you think, lying under the soil. You look closer, assume that the lumps are static. But you notice the figures—barely perceptibly, as if in muted conversation—gesturing toward each other. One head nods gently toward another head; as if in a dream a mouth moves. The soil, though moist, is caked tightly, securing the figures snugly in a home of brown.
You lean in. The words are impossible. The words are muffled (of course!) but that's not the problem. You hear whole words, sentences, exclamations. Guttural sounds, lyric sounds, sounds of crying and sounds of ardor from dark currents in soil.
And if it were to rain? To where would the conversation be swept?
Above, the sun dips behind clouds and a brief shadow of abeyance sweeps gracefully across the three figures. You stand and stare, listening to their conversation, a conversation you swear later—tearing the program into tiny strips—never occurred. You exit the instillation. You feel you have entered a different world.
For days afterward, you speak in a strange tongue of loam and beetle, darkness and cake, root and worm.
“ In a deeply muddled time in history, Joe Bonomo’s Installations shines as parallel possibility. This visually captivating sequence of scenes is magical and oddly hypnotic. You take risks when you step into these rooms. But we need them.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye
